The Worldwatch Institute’s 16th Annual State of the World Symposium will take place on April 11 and will be hosted at the Woman’s National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. Worldwatch President Robert Engelman and senior researchers Michael Renner and Erik Assadourian will speak at the event, where they will officially release State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity.
Over the past 40 years, the world’s middle and upper classes have doubled their consumption levels, and in the coming years, an additional 1 to 2 billion people will aspire to join the consumer class. The report concludes that our planet cannot maintain these increases in resource demand, and therefore we must act quickly to redefine our understanding of the “good life” and redouble our efforts to make that life sustainable.
State of the World 2012 includes sustainability discussions that range from agriculture to biodiversity, green jobs to economic degrowth, communications technologies to sustainable buildings, and local politics to global governance. This wide array of topics will aid Rio+20 participants, as well as global leaders and concerned citizens, to reconsider how we fundamentally change our unsustainable economic system and consumer culture and collectively re-prioritize sustainable living.
After the initial overview presentations, the symposium will feature two panel discussions with other contributing authors of the report, including Joseph Foti of the World Resources Institute, Mia MacDonald of Brighter Green, Michael Replogle and Colin Hughes of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Diana Lind of Next American City, and Bo Normander of Worldwatch Europe.
Click here for more information and here if you would like to register for the event. The launch will also be streamed live, with more details on how you can tune in to follow.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
